After Ubisoft officially announced Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced last month, following years of rumors and reports, I was curious how the game would fit into the larger franchise. So when I got a chance to sit down with the leads of the upcoming Black Flag remake, I had to ask a very nerdy Assassin’s Creed lore question: Is this new game canon or not?
Earlier this month, I flew out to San Francisco and got to play a few hours of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. The game looks gorgeous, feels great to play, and seems like a perfect blend of the classic stealth and gameplay found in past games in the series with the newer, sleeker controls and action featured in the more recent, RPG-flavored entries in the franchise. But who cares about that? The big question I had was how I and other Assassin’s Creed fans would fit this new remake into the larger franchise canon and timeline. So I asked both creative director Paul Fu and game director Richard Knight, and got a surprising answer: Both games are canon. Huh?
“So the way I would put it, and this is my opinion, but the way I put it is: both [are canon],” said Knight. “The original Black Flag, you can still buy, you can still play today. All the events, including Desmond’s friends, all that still happened. Nothing has changed there. But we are the next modern Assassin’s Creed game, and we also happened.”
According to Knight, people can make their “own conclusions” about what that means, and then added: “The cool thing with the Assassin’s Creed brand, because of the Animus, is it could be different people using the Animus. There’s a lot of other things that you’ll only notice by playing the game, but yes, for sure, both are canon.” I wanted to clarify, and asked if all the modern-day stuff that happened in Black Flag back in 2013 still happened in the franchise’s timeline, and Knight confirmed that it did. The entirety of both games is canon.
“So the content that we’ve added are things that canonically happened to Edward,” Knight elaborated.
When I asked Paul Fu about the canon status of Black Flag and its upcoming remake, I got a similar response. Both games are canon, and Fu explained that you can think of this remake as a more “accurate” version of the historical events of Edward Kenway’s life.
“You can think of [Resynced] as a new entry to the Animus, because the Animus is a machine that can be continuously updated to be a bit more accurate, if you will. So, you can think of it that way. In addition, the story from the original remains pretty much the same. Early in conception, we went through the entire game, we reviewed it, and asked ourselves what we wanted to keep, what we wanted to add, and we essentially kept most of it, as long as it made sense. We didn’t really want to change anything that we didn’t have to. We really expanded on it.”
How Black Flag’s ending works in the remake
Of course, before these interviews, Ubisoft had already confirmed that all of the modern-day segments from Assassin’s Creed Black Flag had been removed. I won’t spoil the ending of that game here, but if you’ve played the OG version, you know that the modern-day part of the story plays a big role in the game’s final hours and intertwines with the mysterious Sage character. Ubisoft confirmed that the Sage is still canon, but the ending of Black Flag has changed, and a new scene has been included to help smooth things over while respecting what happened.
“This question [about the ending] came up very, very early in conception,” said Fu. “And we also checked with [longtime Assassin’s Creed writer and joint narrative director] Darby McDevitt to make sure everybody’s aligned.”
“The modern-day [storyline] has evolved a lot since Shadows, so we decided to change the modern-day direction, remove the old modern-day, and have rifts. That said, we knew that fans loved the original modern-day sequences. [Fu paused for a moment.] Some fans loved it, including myself. I actually found [The Sage’s] story quite moving. So, what we did was we took that story, and we knew that fans wanted us to somehow reference it. So there’s an entirely new scene in Resynced that respects that and alludes to that in the best way possible, I’d like to think. Darby also helped with that scene. For me, it’s a very important scene. It’s almost like a love letter to the original.”
Knight also told Kotaku that the new scene is “very much carried out from Edward’s” perspective, adding: “So he has the same kind of like reaction. ‘What is this Sage stuff going on?'”
We’ll have to wait and see how this all works to find out if Ubisoft was able to pull it off. Can Black Flag‘s ending, without modern-day segments, still work without confusing new fans or disappointing longtime veterans of the series? We’ll find out when Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced launches on Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC on July 9.
